The Disgruntled Computer Technician as Clint Eastwood

I've been working on computers for too long. Call it Data Processing, IT, Programming, Analysis, Tech Support, I've been in it all too long. A couple years in IT is long, five years is an eternity, but in my case I've been in it since 1982.

It's been a fruitful career, but it wasn't my original choice. It pays the bills. What further makes this a little different than a lot of IT jobs is that my work is done on what are called "midrange" systems, not PC's and servers where all the "cool" stuff goes on.

However, more and more I see myself as the main character in a Clint Eastwood movie, more typically the aging, wise-cracking, smart-@$$, almost-retired detective/officer/thug/soldier who's almost too burnt out to continue but does the job and finishes it in an "over the top" fashion.

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A typical day in the life:

"A tech's got to know his limitations."

The day started off as usual, I sign on and check out the previous night's carnage, failed hardware, backups that abort, or stuff that the previous shift was too lazy to fix themselves.

There was talk of reorganization, but this has happened so often, I just shrug and check to see if I have a paycheck still coming.

Co-worker: I think you're going to be moved to Disaster Recovery Planning.
Duck: DRP? That's for @$$holes.
CW: I was in DRP for 3 years.
Duck: Yeah...

Last thing I want in this job is to get "promoted" to a group with the most political project in the entire organization, each of the programming, DBA, and support areas all trying to vie for attention with the CIO to show how important they are (and to not cut budgets).

No matter, another personnel change comes down the hall, as my co-worker and I waltz past a sweet young thing:

Duck: Well, the operators get prettier and prettier.
Sweet Young Thing: And the tech reps get older and older.
CW: She's a tech, Duck.
Duck: I knew that. I just wanted to see if she had a sense of humor.

I go back and meet her and find out she's a hardware expert.

Duck: I've never worked with a female hardware tech before. How many are there?
SYT: About 125.
Duck: Mm. Pure window dressing.
SYT: Excuse me?
Duck: Window dressing. About 125 out of a little over 2,000. They have you all around so that the CIO can look good to his feminist shareholders.
SYT: Do you make an effort to be obnoxious, or is it a gift?
Duck: It's a gift. Let's face it, half the things we do are window dressing. Take us running diagnostics alongside that customer database system: it'd take an anti-tank missile to put a disk-crash in that damn thing. There we are, out for show, trying to make the CIO look more technical.

I really made points with her, I know...

After a couple hours of taking silly-@$$ed end-user problems, I take a coffee-break with a couple other guys, all of which are younger than I and haven't gotten the sense to get out of this business while they're young. They complain about piddly little problems that I'd normally handle and fix in 10 seconds blindfolded. They also try to "talk up" and best each other with what they call "death marches" like big installs or fixing problems that made them miss their happy hour after work, the kinda stuff I've had to work with for years:

Duck: I've drank more beer, broke more tape drives, and banged more IBM Marketing reps than all you numb-nuts put together!

The room went silent.

Ah, never mind. On to more drudgery. I get a call from Operations downstairs, they tell me some backups just failed and I have to check the tape robot, which contains a few hundred tapes, about 24 tape drives, and a robotic arm that programmatically moves tapes between storage and the tape drives. On a good day, it only blows up after my shift. No such luck today. I wander downstairs to the computer room, and head towards the tape robot, which actually looks like four black refrigerators all lined up next to each other. I take a look inside and see errors on three drives and a fourth is starting to blink with some error codes. I call IBM:

Duck: Get three tape drives ready...[THWACK!!! Boing!]...My mistake. Four drives.

We get the IBM CE (customer engineer) onsite, replaces the drives, and he's on his way...for now.

I head up to the boss's office for a meeting, but he's on the phone and going past our scheduled time:

The Boss: Well let's have it.
Duck: Have what?
The Boss: A report! What have you been doing?
Duck: Well, for the past three quarters of an hour I've been sitting on my @$$ in your outer office waiting on you!

It doesn't go well, he starts ragging on me for using excessive force, taking care of an overzealous programmer that happened to figure out the Security Admin password. I blew him off the system, revoked his own password, deleted all his files, scratched all his backups, and sent his manager a email recommending that he be fired yesterday.:

Duck: Well, when a junior programmer is signed on with an Admin profile with intent to fiddle with production, I shoot the b*st*rd. That's my policy.
The Boss: Intent? How did you establish that?
Duck: When a guy is running a batch program with a "DELETE FILE" command loop and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out checking the disk drives for read/write errors!

The Boss rants for awhile, I ignore it, then leave his office with a few words.

Duck: Be advised, I'm mean, nasty, and tired. I eat CAT-5 cable and p*ss head-cleaning fluid and I could fire an ENDJOB command through a programmer's @$$ at 300 yards. So why don't you hump somebody else's leg, Mutt-face, before I push yours in.
The Boss: Don't you lecture me, you son of a bitch! Do you know who I am? Do you know my record?
Duck: Yeah... you're a legend in your own mind.

All through the day I get phone calls with other piddly-@$$ed questions and problems, one of which is an annoying programmer that wants an entire library of production data saved to tape and transported. It wouldn't be so bad, except that he's an @$$hole.

Duck: I know what you're thinking. Did he load six tapes or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is an IBM 3590E, the most powerful tape drive in the world, and would blow your fiber-channel clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?

The day ends shortly and as I leave, the Boss tries to corner me for one more tirade on my job and attitude:

Duck: With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me...

And I rode off into the sunset...